Authors: Virginia Swift
Brown-Eyed Girl (5 page)
Sally developed a provisional routine. Dawn came early. Through the east window of Meg's bedroom the sun came up and poured in just as the winsome young Joni Mitchell had imagined, so very long ago, on some butterscotch Chelsea morning.
Get the coffee going, return upstairs to shove on running gear, head to the bathroom to brush teeth. Slip on those Birkenstocks. Back down to the kitchen for coffee, and then out the back door. This great Laramie garden, in full late summerburst, made her forget she had a lot of work ahead, dissipated worry about angry academics and greedy burglars. She walked between the rows of beans, along the low pea fences and admired the high trellises of scarlet runner beans, festooned with red blossoms, dripping with dangling green pendants. Lettuces and spinaches, cool multicolor bouquets of cauliflowers, broccoli, and pale and purple kales. Heaped mounds bursting with huge flat leaves that shaded squashes.
Wyoming vegetable gardens had few pests. Pests weren't stupid. Why try to survive in a place this hard? Did horn worms, zucchini beetles, stinging caterpillars, and their brethren care more about a view, or were they practical enough to opt for a place where it wouldn't freeze eleven out of twelve months? Well, maybe they were stupid, but they wouldn't pick a place where they would die before laying their eggs. Sally liked a view, but she figured it took a big brain to care about whether you could see the mountains from town. Big brain, yeah, but not necessarily a smart animal.
She carried a knife, a huge canning kettle, her coffee cup. Walking among the rows, she cut this, chopped that, pinched the other, drank coffee. She walked back to the house with the big pot piled full of vegetables. She shed the Birkenstocks at the back door and left the heavy kettle on the kitchen table.
Now she put on her socks and shoes, her Walkman, and headed out running. Then it was weird KFAT music, more coffee, a day of reading over the stuff she'd gotten from the Dunwoodie Foundation, browsing Meg's books, picking idly at her guitar, eating Maude's vegetables, pouring a Jim Beam to watch the sunset. For three days it went like this, but on the fourth, Monday, something changed when she returned from her run.
The phone rang. “Katmandu calling,” said a voice.
Less than twenty-four hours after last spring's graduation, Dean Edna McCaffrey and her second husband had been on a one-stop flight from Denver to New York, the first leg of the marathon air trek to Nepal, via London, Istanbul, and New Delhi. After spending three months as a working guest of disciples of the Dalai Lama, she and Tom had returned late at night, conked out, and woken to discover a dead lawn, a houseful of shriveled ferns and a nightmarish parade of answering machine messages. Some messages were welcome: “Hi, Edna. This is Sally. I'm here, ready to have a beverage and talk about Dunwoodie chairs and whatever. Your place or mine?” This made Edna smile.
The next message, which touched on something like the same subject, was substantially
less
welcome. “Hello, Edna. This is Byron Bosworth. We need to talk about the History Department's role in administering the Dunwoodie bequest. The department has met to discuss this matter, and I've sent a memo outlining our funding needs for the year to your office. I've had your secretary set up a meeting for Wednesday afternoon before school starts.” Click. Far be it for the Boz to waste words on the likes of Edna. Edna smiled at this one, too, but it wasn't a very nice smile.
Eighteen years ago, Byron Bosworth had told Edna's then-husband that he thought there was “no room for faculty wives in a university that has real standards.” It was a shame that the anthropology department had seen fit to hire Edna as a part-time adjunct instructor. Edna nevertheless instructed along for another year, publishing articles and writing grant proposals, then accepted a two-year appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Her children went with her to New Jersey, while her husband remained in Laramie. They pretended the separation was only temporary.
At Princeton, Edna had worked closely with Rodney Wertz, the king of cultural anthropology. Her own field work had taken her all over Asia and later to Los Angeles, and it seemed to her that every time she tried to imagine pristine “natives” who inhabited “homelands,” she met a Trobriand Islander wearing a ZZ Top T-shirt. People didn't stay put, she surmised. This stunning observation had led to three prize-winning books on refugees, exiles, expatriates, and diasporas, and had eventually won her a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Byron Bosworth probably thought she got his MacArthur.
During her time in New Jersey, her husband had taken up with a University of Wyoming cheerleader. It was a rotten divorce. But when she finally got tenure in the anthropology department, she did as she damn well pleased. There was plenty of oil money in the state then, money enough , even, to fund a fledgling women's studies program. A small, merry band of feminists kept a lot of balls in the air, year to year.
She became a community builder. Edna was an avid concertgoer and patron of the arts, a member of every commission and task force in the state. And she was known to her lucky friends as the best and most creative cook in Wyoming (what, they asked, was the competition?). Her dinner party invitations were treasured. Her kids went to Laramie High, and Edna ended up falling in love with and marrying her daughter's green-eyed American literature teacher, Tom Youngblood.
Friends from Cambridge and Berkeley and Palo Alto had come to visit during the occasional summers Edna remained in Laramie, and wondered why she didn't move someplace civilized. They didn't realize that despite her warmth, wit, and graciousness, despite her good-looking new husband and MacArthur cash in mutual funds and all the good things that had happened in her life, Edna McCaffrey still lived with the bitter urge for revenge. One big reason she had stayed at the University of Wyoming, turning down much better jobs in much more prestigious places, was that she planned someday to have enough power to really stick it to the bastards who'd messed with her all those years ago.
So Byron Bosworth and the boys had “needs”? Edna grinned nastily. She and the Boz would hold a fakecordial conversation on the matter. Like the best administrators, Edna specialized in appearing sweetly reassuring while being as insulting as she chose, and filing all information for future use.
She went into the kitchen to look up Margaret Dunwoodie's number in the Laramie phone book, a volume smaller and slimmer than Edna's daily planner. She wanted to call to invite Sally Alder to lunch at El Conquistador and to a little dinner party on Saturday night. Sally and Edna had become friends years ago when both had needed the solidarity of sisterhood and the solace of a good laugh. But Sally was also, at this point, a highly expensive property that could be an asset, or a definite liability. She could beâhad beenâa bit of a loose cannon.
It had not been entirely Edna's idea to recruit Sally Alder for the Dunwoodie Chair; in fact, by the time the Foundation and the University had decided to move on the bequest and had brought Edna into the process, Sally was already the clear first choice for the job. Sally was a fine scholar, but there hadn't been the slightest effort to do an open search. And it wasn't just that there might be equally qualified candidates. Back in the days she'd lived in Laramie, before starting school, Sally Alder had been best known as a hard-living bar singer. Who wanted her? Really, why?
The Foundation was secretive. (And who was the Foundation anyhow? There were rumors, of course. Only the lawyer, Sonnenschein, seemed to know.) The president's office was unusually discreet. Edna had done considerable digging and run up against one stone wall after another. Failing to find out anything useful, Edna had decided, in her sensible fashion, not to sweat the details. It would be fun to hang out with Sally again, and to revel in the certainty that the return of Mustang Sally Alder, on a tidal wave of Equality State bullshit and Dunwoodie money, would infuriate precisely those benighted fools who would be powerless to stop it.
Tom came into the kitchen, kissed Edna on the back of the neck, poured her a cup of the fancy coffee he insisted on drinking. She would have been satisfied with Folger's, and she rather missed the suggestive moaning of her grungy old Mr. Coffee, but Tom was picky about coffee. She took a sip and her jet lag rolled back like a Bay Area fog at noon. She punched in Dunwoodie's (now Sally's) number. Sally answered on the third ring.
Chapter 6
The Best Restaurant in Wyoming
As Sally recalled, Hawk and his friends had developed a scale for rating Wyoming restaurants, based on how sick they made you. One star for a visit to the hospital, two for a week on Pepto-Bismol, three for a sleepless night, four if eating there hadn't made you sick lately. A five-star Wyoming restaurant had not made you sick at all, to the best of your recollection. Delice had not found this particular example of wit at all amusing. And Hawk had never even told her how he rated the Wrangler (two stars, based on an unhappy encounter with an improperly handled chicken-fried steak.) Hawk and Sally used to say that the best restaurant in Wyoming was in Colorado.
But they all knew that the best restaurant in Wyoming was, in fact, El Conquistador, the unpretentious Mexican place down on Ivinson Street. It was still there, sixteen years after Sally had savored her last chile relleno and chicken taco lunch combo. Like the Wrangler, the food hadn't changed, but in this case, that was heartwarming.
When Sally walked in to meet her for lunch on Wednesday, Edna McCaffrey was already there, sitting at a corner table with a menu, a yellow plastic water glass, and a basket of chips with scorching hot sauce. Sally was wearing Levi's and a T-shirt and her Birkenstocks. Edna was wearing a costly cherry red silk suit with a tight short skirt and black pumps that showed off her endless legs. Sally knew that if she had tried to eat chips and salsa in such an outfit, she would glop grease and tomatoes all over the silk jacket.
Another hugging scene, this one a pleasure. Edna and Sally had been in the women's studies trenches together during the two years Sally had been a graduate student at UW. Sally imagined the two of them as Union generals who hadn't seen each other since the Mexican War, bent over a much-unfolded map fraying at the creases, plotting out a near-final assault on the tattered Confederate Army.
From Edna's point of view, it was fairly simple. Edna was in charge of an endowed chair, and Sally sat in it. Edna didn't much care for some aspects of the arrangement, like the stipulation that Sally and the papers stayed in the Dunwoodie house. People had tried to break in. That was disturbing. The shadowy Dunwoodie Foundation attached strings to the money. That could cause difficulties. But Edna was willing to play. If anybody wanted to bitch about the way the money was offered and spent, they could deal with that later. Sally could be a problem or she could be a solution, and both of them had reason to see to it that she was not a problem.
Sally Alder had once been a loudmouthed feminist graduate student with undeniable talent and an attitude that terminally ticked off half the men in Wyoming. Edna liked that in a woman, as long as the woman was honest, intelligent, and funny. Sally was, and she appeared to have mellowed in useful ways. She had written three good books, plenty of scholarly articles, had a national reputation in women's history. Now, the two of them would memorialize a brilliant Wyoming woman writer, would make a place for women's history at UW, would have some great dinners, laugh a lot, get in some skiing. The Boz types would hate it, and that was fine. Edna ordered beef flautas and a Dos Equis.
From Sally's point of view, many puzzles remained. She had read the too brief, intriguing biography Margaret Dunwoodie had prepared for public distribution shortly before her death. Sally was mulling over what she'd read. She would soon go down into the basement and into the locked office closet and wade through the boxes in Meg's house, to touch more remnants of this perplexing and deceptively well-documented life. She would help the foundation to spend money, would write and read and speak as she had for twenty years. Eventually, she would either teach courses on women's history at the University of Wyoming, or she would return to Los Angeles. There were advantages and disadvantages to either plan. At UW, the people who claimed to be in charge of explaining the past didn't believe that history had women in it. UCLA was in LA.
Hawk Green was in Laramie.
Don't think about Hawk.
Sally sat down at the table, reached into her daypack and pulled out four glowing trophy zucchinis, gifts for Edna's kitchen. Edna exclaimed over the squashes (something about ratatouille) and swept them into a large black suede tote bag. Sally ordered a relleno and a chicken taco and a Dos Equis. “Tell me what you know about Margaret Dunwoodie,” she said to Edna, “and then tell me what bodies need burying.”
The bones of the story were familiar to Sally from the Foundation biography, which Edna had of course read. But Edna had her own version. In the first years Edna had been at UW, she was a young feminist ethnographer who was sure every woman had an important story to tell. It had occurred to Edna that
somebody
ought to do an oral history with Professor Dunwoodie. Meg was willing to be interviewed ; she wasn't famous then, though she had published some poetry in little magazines, even one poem in
The New Yorker.
And so Edna had gone to Meg Dunwoodie's house one coppery October Saturday morning in 1976, battery-operated tape recorder in hand.
Now she handed Sally copies of the interview transcript and tapes, saying, “Peruse at your convenience. Maybe they'll help you navigate your way through the papersâMeg was notoriously disorganized, and the word has it Maude Stark just threw things in boxes and shoved them in a closet.”
“Maude gave me a slightly less frantic version of the same story.” Everybody seemed to be an expert on the job Sally was about to do. Actually, everybody she'd talked to since she'd arrived knew more about it than she did, and she reminded herself once again that it was better to listen than to bristle. “Thanks a millionâI can't wait to hear the tape. If I could have picked anybody in the world to interview somebody I want to write about, it would be you.” Edna had an international reputation as a careful and gifted interviewer, a person who knew how to establish rapport, who always managed to ask the right questions.
“Meg Dunwoodie was a magnetic woman, Sal, even in old age. She was so tall, with those blues eyes that could look right through you. And she had this, oh, oldfashioned kind of graciousnessâoffered me terrific coffee and apple cake Maude must have baked.
“Of course she was gracious like a calculator. When she answered my questions, she seemed so wide-open and direct that I almost didn't notice that she wasn't telling me much I couldn't get from reading the entry for her in
Who's Who in the United States.
She gave me more elegant renditions of the same information, of course.” Edna dipped and ate another chip, immaculately. Sally had salsa spots all over her Hot Rize T-shirt. “But as I thought about it, it felt like she was a master at
seeming
to reveal, while actually concealing all kinds of interesting and troubling stuff.”
Their delicious lunches came, with iced tea. Sally spooned a little of the torrid salsa into her taco, took a bite and blessed her own senses. “Look, Ed, I know I need to figure out ways to do some public talks to keep the trustees and the president and the Foundation happy. But I'm not real sure how much I'll be able to talk about the project. I don't want to do anything that violates the terms of the bequest, and to tell you the truth, I think maintaining deep, dark secrecy, then telling all is one of those great book-marketing strategies I've never quite been able to cash in on. I don't mind telling people I can't discuss work in progress.”
Edna tried to bury her disappointment. She had, reasonably enough, seen the Meg Dunwoodie project as a collaboration. She also suppressed her surprise at the fact that Sally could be so deliberate about strategy. The Sally Alder she'd known had been damned smart, but spontaneous to a fault. It wasn't just a question of going for the short-term pleasure over the long-term gain. Sally had seemed incapable of calculating her interests, period.
But Edna was a patient woman, and she knew that Sally, in the end, was not a discreet one. Eventually what Sally knew would come bursting out in a cathartic confession, and Edna was a logical person for her to confide in. “Yeah, you've got to play this one conservative,” Edna agreed. “You might as well do this right and make some money while you're at it.” Edna took the last swig of beer, reached for her iced tea. “But I don't think you'll have to cook up a mood of mystery.” She savored another bite, thinking about how to give Sally some rather strange information. “There have been rumors around here ever since Meg died about her hiding some kind of treasure somewhere.”
Sally almost choked on her fire-breathing relleno. She took a drink of water, fanned her face, and said, “What?!”
“The way I heard it,” Edna explained, deftly catching a glob of guacamole before it could fall off her flauta and into her lap, “it had to do with her father, old Mac Dunwoodie, who got pretty paranoid at the end of his life. He had some money, of course, and the story is that he cashed in his securities, traded them for gold coins. Supposedly buried a fortune in Krugerrands somewhere, or she did. I wouldn't be surprised if all kinds of people around here have the idea that there's a treasure map somewhere in those boxes. Or maybe just a big trunkful of gold, stuck away in her basement or something. There've been some attempted break-ins. The police have been keeping close tabs on the house.”
“I've heard about the break-ins,” Sally said, “but I've assumed they were the typical thingânobody home and plenty of stuff to steal. What's this treasure business?”
“Ask your friend Deputy Langham. I wouldn't be surprised if Byron Bosworth showed up there in a ski mask and a black turtleneck. That self-righteous prick probably thinks he's entitled to burglarize her house. He's put me on notice that he expects the history department to have some ârole' in disbursing the bequest. One or the other of us will be in hell first,” she said softly.
“Boz? He's too chickenshit.” Ludicrous. Still, the scene seemed at that moment uncomfortably plausible, no matter how ridiculous. Sally considered another beer and decided against it, sipping her own iced tea.
Why the hell hadn't Dickie mentioned a treasure, she wondered. She was less panic-stricken than pissed. No, that wasn't it. She was strangely exhilarated. Imagine having to move from LA to Laramie to get a thrill. She ate another chip, drank some more tea. “Well, I guess I need to look on the bright side. I mean, being a historian isn't usually all that excitingâhanging around in silent rooms, waiting for the dead to speak and all that. At least this will add a little spice to my pathetic, barren life.”
Thinking about Los Angeles, Sally decided, put the whole thing in perspective. “I guess you have to expect that people are going to try to get into a vacant houseâespecially one that was owned by a person who died rich. I mean, in LA, if I went away for the weekend, I'd always end up having to pay some student a hundred bucks to sit around watching my TV, just so nobody would steal it. I seriously doubt anybody in this town would actually bust in when I'm there, and Maude will be around and she's terrifying enough, God knows.”
Edna laughed and polished off the last morsel of her flautas. “The important thing is to fulfill the terms of the bequest, get the book out, use the money, and defeat the cretins. And most of all, to have fun. I've got to go to a meeting with the Cretin King,” she said, rising gracefully, shedding not a single crumb. They hugged again. “Thanks for the squash. We'll see you Saturday night at seven. Bring wineâwhatever you can find around here.”
Sally thought that was pretty funny.
Edna spoke once more, softly. “Lock your doors, Sal,” she said, “and watch your back.”